I’m not sure how Brian’s approach solves the basic generic token exchange use 
case that we have

From: OAuth [mailto:oauth-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Justin Richer
Sent: Tuesday, July 7, 2015 4:47 PM
To: Mike Jones <michael.jo...@microsoft.com>
Cc: <oauth@ietf.org> <oauth@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Token Chaining Use Case

This approach is not a good fit for my use cases, and it’s still not  OAuth-y 
at all. It requires a specially-formed security assertion on the way in, which 
the client must understand and generate. I still can’t take an arbitrary token 
I’ve been handed by someone else and pass it off to be pushed forward. The new 
“*_type” parameters seem to merely kick the can down the road instead of 
addressing the problems with the current specification.

I think that Brian’s approach works much better. It unrolls important 
parameters, properly uses the token endpoint, and allows for arbitrarily 
formatted input tokens.

When combined with Nat’s draft that specifies how to perform all generic OAuth 
requests as JWTs (or even some of the upcoming PoP work if we ever do that), 
you’ve pretty much got the draft below but with much more flexibility and power.

 — Justin

On Jul 7, 2015, at 6:51 PM, Mike Jones 
<michael.jo...@microsoft.com<mailto:michael.jo...@microsoft.com>> wrote:

As just updated<http://self-issued.info/?p=1412>, I believe that the working 
group token exchange draft 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-token-exchange-02 can now also 
serve the “OAuthy” token exchange use cases, such as Justin and Phil’s token 
chaining use case, as well as support general token exchange, including 
exchange of JWT and SAML tokens.  The mechanism would be the same one that 
Brian suggested below – defining security token type values for OAuth 2.0 
access tokens and refresh tokens – enabling them to be used as inputs and 
outputs in any of the token exchanges.

For instance, by using “access token” as the input security token type, 
providing new scope values, and using “access token” as the output security 
token type, token chaining is achieved.

Now, a question for the working group…  What should the security token type 
values for access token and refresh token be?  Two different choices seem to 
make sense.
(1)  Use the values “access_token” and “refresh_token”, which are used in RFC 
6749 token response values.
(2)  Define new URNs for this usage, such as 
urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:access-token and 
urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:refresh-token.

I’d personally be fine just using the short names in (1).

If people agree with this approach, we can document this usage in the -03 draft 
and publish it as soon as the submission tool reopens Monday morning during 
IETF 93.

                                                                -- Mike

From: OAuth [mailto:oauth-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Brian Campbell
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 3:15 PM
To: Justin Richer
Cc: <oauth@ietf.org<mailto:oauth@ietf.org>>
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Token Chaining Use Case

This kind of token exchange might involve exchanges other than swapping an AT 
for another AT (and downscoping it). It might be an AT for a structured JWT 
specifically targeted at one of the the particular services that the original 
RS needs to call. Or an AT might be exchanged for a SAML assertion to use with 
legacy SOAP serveries.  A good general token exchange mechanism enables lots of 
variations of cases like the one Justin mentioned. And more. In fact, I think 
downscoping might be a minority use case where what token exchange is often 
need for is translating tokens from what you have into what the resource you 
need to call can deal with.
There need to be ways for the caller to tell the AS about the token it's asking 
for - by type or by the address/identifier of where it'll be used. There needs 
to be ways for the caller to authenticate to the AS. And there needs to be some 
way of expressing this delegation thing (though I'm still not totally convinced 
it couldn't be just the token is about the user/principal and the caller/client 
of the exchange is who is being delegated to).
I realize few (approaching zero) people have or are going to read it but I have 
endeavored to cover all these things in the 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-campbell-oauth-sts-02 draft. It's an early 
draft so not without it some rough edges but can provide some guidance on what 
is needed and offers some protocol syntax for expressing it. I believe Justin's 
use case would be covered by it (defining a specific token type URI for an 
OAuth access token issued by the AS in question might be needed) as are many 
others.

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 1:31 PM, Justin Richer 
<jric...@mit.edu<mailto:jric...@mit.edu>> wrote:
As requested after last night’s informal meeting, here is the token chaining 
use case that I want to see represented in the token swap draft.


[ Client ]  ->   [ A ] -> [ B ] -> [ C ]

An OAuth client gets an access token AT1, just like it always would, with 
scopes [A, B, C] in order to call service A, which requires all three scopes. 
Service A (an RS) accepts this token since it has its scope, and then needs to 
call service B in turn, which requires scopes [B, C]. It could just re-send the 
token it got in, AT1, but that would give the downstream RS the ability to call 
services with scope [ A ] and it should not be allowed to do that. To limit 
exposure, service A calls a token swap at the AS to create AT2 with scopes [ B, 
C ], effectively acting as an OAuth client requesting a downscoped token based 
on AT1. Service A then acts as an OAuth client to call service B, now acting as 
an RS to service A’s client, and can fulfill the request. And it’s turtles all 
the way down: Service B can also call service C, and now B acts as a client, 
requesting AT3 with scope [ C ] based on AT2, and sending AT3 to service C. 
This prevents C from being able to call B or A, both of which would have been 
available if AT1 had been passed around. Note that service A or the Client can 
also request a downscoped token with [ C ] to call service C directly as well, 
and C doesn’t have to care how it got there.


In other words, it lets the client software be very, very dumb. It doesn’t have 
to do any special processing, doesn’t have to know what’s in the token, it just 
follows the recipe of “I got a token, I get another token based on this to call 
someone else”. It’s also analogous to the refresh token flow, but with access 
tokens going in and out. I’ve deployed this setup several times in different 
service deployments. Even though there is a performance hit in the additional 
round trips (as Phil brought up in another thread), in these cases the desire 
to have the tokens hold least privilege access rights (smallest set of scopes 
per service) outweighed any performance hit (which was shown to be rather small 
in practice).

What I want is for the token swap draft to define or use a mechanism that 
allows us to do this. I think we can do that pretty easily by adjusting the 
token swap syntax and language, and explicitly calling out the semantic 
processing portion (the current core of the document) for what it is: a way for 
a token issuer to communicate to a token service specific actions. At a high 
level, the spec would be something like:



1. How to swap a token at an AS
  1. Send a request to the token endpoint with a new grant type, and a token 
(of any type/format/flavor) on the way in
  2. Get back a new token in a token response
2. Communicating act as / on behalf of semantics via a JWT assertion
  1. How to create (as an AS/RS/client/other issuer) a JWT with act-as semantics
  2. What to do (as an AS/RS) with a JWT with act-as semantics
  3. How to create a JWT with on-behalf-of semeantics
  4. What to do with a JWT with on-behalf-of-semantics
  5. How to possibly represent these semantics with something other than a JWT



Section 2 uses the syntax from section 1. Other applications, like the one I 
laid out above, can use the syntax from section 1 as well. This works for 
structured, unstructured, self-generated, cross-domain, within-domain, and 
other tokens.


 — Justin

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